Before Sue Grafton Was a Star

ABC: The crime novelist Sue Grafton, who died on Dec. 28, often seemed like a permanent fixture of the best-seller lists. Her alphabetically titled mysteries about the private eye Kinsey Millhone spent something like 400 weeks on the lists over all, and 10 of those books (beginning with “L Is for Lawless,” in 1995) entered at No. 1. So it comes as a surprise to learn that Grafton didn’t have a best seller until the series was eight years old and six books along, when “F Is for Fugitive” finally cracked the paperback list in 1990. “When I started writing the series, who even knew this was going to work?” Grafton told the critic and editor Sarah Weinman in a 2009 interview for The Los Angeles Times. That was the year that “U Is for Undertow” came out, and Weinman asked whether Grafton felt any pressure to make it all the way to Z. “For the first half of the alphabet, people bet I couldn’t,” Grafton replied. “Now, they are rooting for me.”

In the end, cancer claimed Grafton before she could embark on that final book, which she had planned — poignantly, it turns out — to call “Z Is for Zero.” So Kinsey Millhone’s last stand will remain in “Y Is for Yesterday,” which was released in August and went straight to the top of the hardcover fiction list. “As far as we in the family are concerned,” Grafton’s daughter Jamie Clark wrote, announcing the death online, “the alphabet now ends at Y.”

J.K.: “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls,” by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, is still going strong on the middle grade hardcover list, at No. 4 in its 27th week. And now there’s a sequel: Like the original, “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2” (which hit No. 5 last week) offers brief inspirational biographies of 100 women across a range of disciplines. That includes literature — one profile in the new book is of J. K. Rowling. “At 6,” it begins, “Joanne wrote a short story about a rabbit and titled it ‘Rabbit.’” Success was preordained.

PS.: There aren’t typically a lot of debuts on the list at this time of year. People crave the comfortable more than the new, and resolutions haven’t kicked in yet. But these lists also reflect last-minute holiday shopping — so earlier best sellers reappear, as gift givers turn to the books they loved. This week sees the return of Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (last on the list in October) at No. 15; and Lisa Wingate’s “Before We Were Yours” (last on the list in November) at No. 13; as well as the continued presence of Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach,” which climbs a spot to No. 14 after returning last week for the first time since November.